Chasing the scent of Love, Truth, Beauty, and Mirth, wherever it may lead.

Wednesday, August 15, 2012

2012
and the Mayan Calendar

Can I
Become Two?

View from the deck, Ocean View Fishing Pier, by Stefano Davanzo, used with permission.

My
wife Jala and I were having a birthday celebration supper-for-two on the top
deck of the Ocean View Fishing Pier in Norfolk the other night when we recalled
that the 25th anniversary of Harmonic Convergence was only days away. Older
heads will remember Harmonic Convergence. It occurred on August 16-17, 1987,
and, thanks to world-wide media coverage, revealed for the first time to masses
of people that a shamanistic, Mayan, stone-carved calendar would run out of
future dates on December 21, 2012.

The
man who brought Harmonic Convergence to the world’s attention was Jose
Arguelles, a Mexican-American philosopher with knowledge of things most
esoteric. I know because I read his book, The
Mayan Factor. It was about as easy to understand as modern physics. Some
accused him of making it all up out of his fevered imagination. Whatever the
case, I think I grasped his general drift.

Of
course, the world will not end on Dec. 21, 2012. Whoever says that is out of touch.

However,
while Jala and I reminisced—looking out over the Bay from the open deck above
the Pier, nursing our $2-bottles of Dos Equis—a lot of what I’d read back in
1987 came back to me.

The
Mayans plotted their calendar sometime in the 7th or 8th century AD.
It tracked a single cycle in the age of the Earth, which is the cycle they were
living in and we are about to see end. That cycle, much like the months and
years of our western calendar, has many repeating sub-divisions but as a whole
it’s about 5,000 years long.

The
Mayan calendar we hear so much about began on August 13,
3113 BC and
ends on December 21, 2012. The dates are exact because they are
calculated according to the regular motions of the heavens, similar to our
western calculations in any standard ephemeris.

So
from the Mayan point of view, 2013 will be the first year in the next
5,000-year cycle, which begins only a short four months from now.

Arguelles
goes on to say that at Harmonic Convergence—August
16-17, 1987—Earth
received the very specific galactic signal that the last phase of a 5,000-year
cycle had arrived. From then on, with rapid acceleration over a period of 25
years, the shift into the next 5,000-year cycle would take place.

Most
experts thought Arguelles was mad, but his theories always made a certain sense
to Jala and me because even in the late 1970s we noticed an apparent
acceleration in the pace of life, “Time is speeding up,” we used to say because
that’s the way it felt.

But
if something is beginning, we asked ourselves—sipping our beer as we watched
evening fall over the Bay from the deck of the Pier—what’s ending? Sometimes
it’s hard to know the difference. Can we think of any new thing that happened
around 3000 BC that could give us a clue?

I
remembered reading that people in Assyria, which is modern Iraq, invented writing then—the beginning of
recorded history in the West. Whatever happened before can be interpreted only
through non-verbal records, whether by science, legend, myth, or scripture.
That means that western civilization as we have come to know it began around
3000 BC with the invention of writing.

Some
say that in ages before 3000 BC civilization was matriarchal. Women had equal
or dominant status with men, and societies were far less violent and destructive
than in our historical age, when warring civilizations rise and fall in
tireless waves. Some few of those matriarchal traditions have survived in
isolated pockets of indigenous communities around the planet. While their lives
change little from generation to generation, their general well-being
significantly exceeds our own in the West, if I can believe what I’ve read or
seen on TV and in documentaries.

But
matriarchal civilizations get little attention in the history of our age, which
would never claim to be matriarchal.

What
kind of an age has it really been?

For
that, we can only learn from history, which tells us that the passing age has
been about individuals who rise to positions of prominence and leadership in
their societies and make the proverbial difference, for better or for worse.
Until very recently, history has been about them almost exclusively, with an
emphasis on their achievements in war and administration.

It
has been an Age of Individualism. If it had a number, it would be the number
One.

Lately,
in all the media vetting of Paul Ryan since Romney appointed him, it’s been
said more than once that he stands for Individualism. That’s also a key virtue
in the writings of Ayn Rand, one of Ryan’s philosophical mentors.

Now
here’s where it gets intriguing to me. If the Mayans are right and an entire
great age, the Age of Individualism, is over, the Republican Party is
currently, unabashedly declaring itself to be the Party of the Past. It would
be as if, at this dawn of a New Age, Republicans are proudly proclaiming
themselves in defiance of the cosmos.

This
is not my opinion, or if it is it’s also a plain fact. If the Mayan calendar
can in any way identify times of great change, we are quite conceivably at the
end of the 5,000-year Age of Individualism.

From
there Jala and I began to wonder what things would look like if Individualism
is no longer the organizing paradigm of civilization. What would we be shifting
toward as we go into the next 5,000 years?

She
said, “Two.” If the Age of Individualism relates to One, then the coming age
could logically relate to Two. (Unless we’re headed backwards toward Zero, in
which case all bets are off.)

Two
stands for the Other. So it will be very cool, we agreed, if the New Age is
about one another—the Age of Relationship.

In
the Age of Relationship, if only at first for purposes of survival, we
Earthlings will eventually decide to drop our masks, lay down our arms, and
begin work on the much more interesting task of establishing harmonious
relations with one another across all present barriers.

It’s
just a poetic theory, perhaps, which Jala and I conjured between us as the
silky evening rose from the Bay and we celebrated my 72nd birthday a few days
late and looked ahead another few days to the 25th anniversary of Harmonic
Convergence.

But
maybe there’s something to the theory. Maybe it’s even a working hypothesis.

In
any case, we’re sure to observe it, for it’s also the 25th
anniversary of my mother’s memorial service at the Unitarian-UniversalistChurch in Lancaster, PA. She was a new-age information addict who
died on August 13, 1987, the same day the present Mayan age began in 3113 BC.

Obviously,
however things turn out, for Jala and me Harmonic Convergence and the Mayan
calendar will stick in our memories for as long as we can remember.